Thoughts on technology, leadership, security, infrastructure, automation, and the systems between them.
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Leadership
I've been feeling under the weather lately, and with the flu making its rounds among coworkers, I've been thinking about something. What happens when someone your IT department depends on unexpectedly calls out sick? As a supervisor, should I call or text them because I need help? Should I expect them to answer an...
Leadership
Three months down, seven to go! Just completed my third month of the North Carolina Certified Government Chief Information Officer (CGCIO) program at the UNC School of Government. This month's focus was IT governance, strategy, artificial intelligence, and personal leadership. And one theme kept coming back throughout...
Cybersecurity
Ask an IT department if they allow shared accounts, and you'll probably hear: "No. Everyone has their own account." Fair enough. But let me ask a different question. Who has access to your root account? What about your local Administrator account? Your emergency break glass account? That service account created five...
Cybersecurity
What if the information we're protecting today becomes readable tomorrow? Not because someone stole a password or bypassed a firewall, but because the mathematics protecting that information is no longer enough. Welcome to Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC). For decades, technologies like RSA and elliptic curve...
Infrastructure
“Broadband is not the differentiator. The absence of broadband is the differentiator.” That statement has stuck with me. As technology leaders in North Carolina, particularly in our rural communities, we need to change the way we think about connectivity. There was a time when broadband access could be marketed as an...
Leadership
For years, hiring managers were told to look for the "rockstar." The person who walks in and immediately stands out. The smartest person in the room. The one who can seemingly do the work of three people. But here's the problem with rockstars: Sometimes they know they're rockstars. And sometimes everything starts...
Leadership
One of the most important skills in IT leadership has nothing to do with technology. It’s learning how to talk about technology to people who don’t live in our world. Think about a box of cereal. When you walk down the grocery aisle, the front of the box doesn’t lead with a paragraph explaining every ingredient, how...
Leadership
One of the themes that continues to stand out to me through the NC CGCIO program is how much the role of technology leadership has changed. Being an IT leader today isn’t just about keeping the network up, protecting systems, replacing hardware, or implementing the next piece of technology. Those things still matter...
Leadership
This month continued to challenge how I think about technology leadership. One idea in particular stuck with me: technology should not be the starting point of the conversation. The mission should be. As IT leaders, it is easy to talk about infrastructure, cybersecurity, cloud platforms, applications, integrations, and...
Cybersecurity
I heard this phrase today, and my cybersecurity brain immediately went somewhere else with it. In cybersecurity, the diggers are almost always ahead of the fillers. Someone discovers a vulnerability before there is a patch. Someone develops a new attack technique before there is a detection rule. Someone finds a way...
Leadership
There is a big difference between digitization and transformation. Sometimes an organization takes a process that has existed for years, moves the form online, adds an electronic approval workflow, sends some automated notifications, and calls it digital transformation. But did we actually make the process better? Or...
Leadership
The higher you climb in IT, the more human the job becomes. That's one of the concepts I've been reflecting on since beginning the CGCIO program. Early in an IT career, we tend to measure ourselves by technical ability. Can I fix it? Can I build it? Can I secure it? Can I keep it running? Those skills don't become less...
Leadership
First CGCIO class is officially in the books. I went into the UNC School of Government’s Certified Government Chief Information Officer program expecting to learn. What I did not fully appreciate was how valuable the conversations outside of the material would be. Over the first two days, we explored leadership, the...
Cybersecurity
I have a fun cybersecurity thought experiment: Could Zero Trust survive the Borg? Think about the Borg from Star Trek, or any future where humans somehow share knowledge collectively. Everyone knows what everyone else knows. Your password? Known. Your PIN? Known. Your favorite food? Known. Your mother's maiden name?...
Technology
Any parent probably knows this phenomenon. Mom has told the kids three times to settle down. “Stop.” “Leave your brother alone.” “Guys, I mean it.” Then Dad walks into the room. “Enough.” Suddenly, everybody discovers the ability to hear. It isn’t necessarily that the kids respect Dad more or that Mom was wrong. Dad’s...
Leadership
You do not always get the hand you want. You get the hand you are dealt, and then you figure out how to make it work. The more I think about it, the more that feels like working in higher education. The difference is that we are not all holding the same cards. IT may be looking at cybersecurity, aging infrastructure...
Leadership
There’s an old military style saying I’ve always liked: “The effective range of an excuse is zero.” In military terms, effective range is the distance at which a weapon or system can reliably accomplish its intended purpose. An excuse has none. I think the same principle applies surprisingly well to IT leadership. The...
Leadership
If your disaster recovery plan includes calling Bob because he's the only person who knows how something works, congratulations. Bob is now critical infrastructure. 😄 We spend a lot of time in IT thinking about redundancy. Redundant power. Redundant internet connections. Redundant storage. Backups. Failover. High...
Technology
As community colleges prepare for another Fall semester, many of us are continuing to strengthen cybersecurity by expanding Multi Factor Authentication (MFA). It's the right thing to do. But here's a question I've been thinking about. Should owning a personal smartphone become a requirement for accessing a community...
System
I've been thinking about a term I recently heard: digital dust. It's the data we continue to keep because nobody has decided whether it still has value. As IT leaders, we're often asked, "How long should we retain backups?" The discussion usually turns into storage costs, licensing, or cloud pricing. Those are...
